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Translated by Cardinal Newman.
St Athanasius the Great Resources Online and in Print
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70 Pages
Page 3
The tract before us is in effect a fierce anonymous pamphlet against Constantius. Even apart from the references in the letters to the Monks and to Serapion (see below), the work bears clear marks of having been intended for secret circulation (for the practice, see Fialon, pp. 193-199). 'Instead of the "pious" Emperor who was so well versed in Scripture, whose presence would gladden a dedication festival, whose well-known humanity forbade the supposition that he could have perpetrated a deliberate injustice, we find a Costyllius (or "Connikin") whose misdeeds could only be palliated by the imbecility which rendered him the slave of his own servant--inhuman towards his nearest of kin,--false and crafty, a Pharaoh, a Saul, an Ahab, a Belshazzar, more cruel than Pilate or Maximian, ignorant of the Gospels, a patron of heresy, a precursor of Antichrist, an enemy of Christ, as if himself, Antichrist, and--the words must be written--self-abandoned to the future doom of fire' (Bright, Introd. p. lxxviii., and see S:S:9, 30, 32, 34, 40, 45, 46, 51, 53, 67-70, 74, 80). There are certainly many passages which one could wish that Athanasius had not written,--one, not necessary to specify, in which he fully condescends to the coarse brutality of the age, mingling it unpardonably with holy things. But Athanasius was human, and exasperated by inhuman vindictiveness and perfidy. If in the passages referred to he falls below himself, and speaks in the spirit of his generation, there are not wanting passages equal in nobility to anything he ever wrote. Once more to quote Dr. Bright: 'The beautiful description of the Archbishop's return from his second exile, and of its moral and religious effect upon Alexandrian Church society (25), the repeated protests against the principle of persecution as alien to the mind of the Church of Christ (29, 33, 67), the tender allusion to sympathy for the poor as instinctive in human nature (63), the vivid picture--doubtless somewhat coloured by imagination--of the stand made by Western bishops, and notably for a time by Liberius, against the tyrannous dictation of Constantius in matters ecclesiastical (34 sqq. 76), the generous estimate of Hosius and Liberius in the hour of their infirmity (41, 45), the three golden passages which describe the union maintained by a common faith and a sincere affection between friends who are separated from each other (40), the all-sufficient presence of God with His servants in their extremest solitude (47), and the future joy when heaven would be to sufferers for the truth as a calm haven to sailors after a storm (79). It is in such contexts that we see the true Athanasius, and touch the source of his magnificent insuperable constancy' (p. lxxix.). Nothing could be more just, or more happily put. It ought to be noted before leaving this part of the subject, that the language put into the mouth of Constantius and the Arians (33 fin. 1, 3, 9, 12, 15, 30, 42, 45, 60), is not so much a report of their words as 'a representationad invidiam of what is assumed to have been in their minds.' Other instances of this are to be found in Athanasius (Ep. Aeg. 18, Orat. iii. 17), and he uses the device advisedly (de Syn. 7, middle).
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/athanasius/history-arians.asp?pg=3
